WTF 2022: Working with Trouble and Failures in conversation between humans and robots
Invited Speakers
Patrick Healey
Title: "Running repairs: Coordinating meaning in dialogue"
Bio: Patrick Healey is Professor of Human Interaction and Head of the Cognitive Science Research Group in the School of Electronic Engineering, Queen Mary, University of London. He is Turing Fellow and recently served as Senior Researcher in Residence at the Digital Catapult and as 2016 International Visiting Chair in Empirical Foundations of Linguistics at Sorbonne Cite / Paris 7. Healey's research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of human-human interaction and the development of technologies that can enable richer, more effective forms of communication.
Gabriel Skantze
Title: "Building Common Ground in Human-Robot Interaction"
Bio: Gabriel Skantze is a Professor in Speech Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He is leading several research projects on Conversational AI and Human-Robot Interaction. Since 2019, he is the President of SIGDIAL, the ACL/Interspeech Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. He is also co-founder and chief scientist of the social robotics company Furhat Robotics.
Saul Albert
Title: "Repair, recruitment, and (virtual) agency in a smart homecare setting"
The data present within this talk comes from a corpus of over 100 hours of video featuring interactions between a disabled person and their carer using a voice interface and a range of smart home devices as part of a daily care routine.
Bio: Saul Albert is a lecturer in social science (social psychology) in Communication and Media at Loughborough University.
His research explores the technology of social interaction at two ends of the spectrum of formalization. At one end, his work on conversational AI asks which features and mechanisms of human social action can be represented and modeled computationally. At the other, he studies how people make aesthetic judgements and interact while dealing with underdetermined cultural objects and situations. This program spans multiple, often incompatible disciplines, so his work builds methodological interfaces between them.
Ioannis Papaioannou
Title: "Tackling the Challenges of Open-Domain Conversational AI Systems"
Bio: Ioannis Papaioannou is Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder of Alana.
Ioannis’ dedication to driving forward the future of human-robot interaction ensures Alana is always at the forefront of conversational AI. He holds a PhD in conversational AI, specialising in open-domain, coherent and engaging multi-turn dialogue policies.
He has a wealth of experience across the tech industry, having designed and successfully deployed several large-scale projects. Ioannis was one of the main developers of Alana during the Amazon Alexa Prize Competition 2017-2018 and led the Heriot-Watt team in 2017.
